Danger can happen when you least expect it!
Today is Thursday, November 27th, 2008 – American Thanksgiving – tho you wouldn’t know it here. We are in San Carlos, a small little Mexican town that has grown up out of the tourism business. There are no big resorts here, just small hotels and a couple of RV parks. We feel right at home here – the people are very friendly, it is clean and relatively quiet. The RV Park we are staying in is only about 1/3 full – we’re not sure whether this is from the down swing in the economy, or the time of year. The owner told us that most “snowbirds” start coming in December, and it is quite full during the months of January and February.
Today it has been cool – well maybe not cool – + 25 degrees but quite breezy – the wind chill factor makes it feel cooler! We are across the street from the beach, but it just doesn’t feel warm enough to sit on the beach – certainly not warm enough to go in the ocean. It’s OK to just relax, which is what we have done today. Just a few kms. South of here is the small fishing village of Guaymas (GWAY – mas). We plan on going there tomorrow to have a look around.
We left Casa Grande (about one hour south of Phoenix) yesterday morning at about 0700 hrs. The trip was pretty uneventful – the border crossing paperwork is interesting – that took us about 1 ½ hours – we were really glad to get out of there and on the road. Nogales is a border town that has had a lot of trouble lately. We just drove around the perimeter, but you could see it is very poor – a lot of shanty-type shacks. It’s hard to imagine how the people there survive.
The toll roads in Mexico are just fine – we had no problems at all. Even navigating through one of the bigger cities (Hermisillo) was pretty straight forward – but we did have a book that told us almost every street and turn we could possibly need to get through the by-pass. I’m the navigator extraordinaire, and Arturo maneuvers that truck and fifth wheel like a pro driver – we didn’t even swear at each other once!!
The night before we left Phoenix we experienced our first real sense of danger. We went to Arturo’s sister’s place for supper – just one block away from where we parked the fifth wheel. We walked home, and heard an odd beeping sound – like an alarm, or something like that. As we got closer to our RV, it got louder. I joked to Arturo “I hope that’s not coming from our place!” . . . . and guess what, it was. The propane detector was beeping – warning us of propane in the RV. We cautiously opened the door, and it was pretty obvious by the smell that propane was somewhere. Without turning on a light (we didn’t want to blow us sky high) we found that one of the burners on the stove was on – but unlit. We can’t figure out how this happened, as we haven’t even used the stove inside, and it’s pretty hard to turn them on without knowing – but whatever –it happened, and we are lucky beyond belief that that propane detector was working. Can you imagine the headlines . . . . "SNOWBIRDS LIGHT UP THE ARIZONA NIGHT SKY!!!"
You see . . . Danger can happen when you least expect it!
On Saturday we plan to head further south through Culican, and find another place to stop by the sea . . . and then on to Celestino on Monday. We honestly don’t think we will experience anything more dangerous that the propane incident in Arizona.
Will be in touch
Arturo y DeBeeb (BB)
PS: I can't get the pictures downloaded from my camera - so no photos until that little gliche is figured out!
